Caligula by Sam Wilkinson

Sep 6, 2010

Crazy. Insane. Out of control. Egotistical. Blood-thirsty. Psychotic. This is just a sample of adjectives stereotypically ascribed to many of the Roman emperors, but were the emperors really as mad as common, popular belief teaches us they were? Were they honestly as looney, messed up and deranged as befitting a perfectly wild addition to a morbid rendition of “Alice in Wonderland”? Sam Wilkinson, professor of Classics at the University of London, in his 128 pages pamphlet “Caligula”, does his best to weed out fact from such superficial assumptions on everyone’s favourite nefarious megalomaniac, Gaius Caligula. This study is a fascinating counterbalance to the general biographies on Caligula that tend to simply present the ancient sources and not spend sufficient energies on testing the sources for accuracy over bias…